There are plenty of advertising journalists, so-called experts as well as strategists, planners, entertainment outlets and agency heads critiquing Super Bowl XLV commercials. So you don’t need my opinion on what worked, what didn’t and what was a complete waste of client money.

All around the country, maybe even the world, eyeballs tuned into see the Super Bowl, some 111 million in the US. This has become my industry’s only time that we can come close to what the guys in Mad Men experienced - captive audiences.  As we all know that has been long gone and we need to play to so many outlets and new ones popping up everyday that we are seeing a shift from account services to an army of strategists, planners, etc. as well as splintered creative departments.

And many who tune in do not do so by themselves. Some might be a father with his 2 little girls to a Church auditorium in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. While this isn’t Ice Capades, and certainly not the UFC, we get to see the 2 best teams knocked down to the one best team. We get an extravaganza from beginning to end. A half time show with almost no expense spared. And the one day that America is open to ad messages, that will talk about these ad messages, unlike any other day of the year.

It is a great day for the agencies, they can tout how they had a spot in front of the largest audience assembled and the clients wait for the sales to roll in all the time checking every press outlet that says their name.  It is the day the CMO can point to as to why they deserve a raise or get fired.

Unfortunately, while you might be sitting there trying to explain to your young children about the specialness of the day, you might also have to explain why that man in the PepsiMax spot wants to sleep with his date. Is that what you signed up for? Isn’t this about 3rd and goal and not some dude trying to get to home?

It made me cringe.

Then this made me think.  

One of my favorite cartoons is Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes, etc. They were all originally created for adults and played in theaters before the feature. So popular were these cartoons, they beat everything Disney was doing in theaters. At least 2 or 3 generations ended up consuming this on TV as they grew up. When you are 5 or 8 things go over your head or should I say the writers of Bugs Bunny knew how to create for multiple audiences. If it was a sex joke, the adult got it but the kid had no clue and projected what they understood. Truly smart writing. Even if half of what was taking place was a bunny with a Brooklyn accent messing with Elmer Fudd or Daffy Duck or whatever situation he was placed in.

[One does not have to go that far back. Ren & Stimpy was a sensation back in the 90’s, including a toy line, etc. but then when it decided to have the characters in adult situations circa 2003, topless women and all, it lasted all of 1 month on cable. Never to be heard from again.]

Somewhere along the lines, my fellow creatives have decided everyone is stupid or everyone needs the same message, how you talk to your drinking buddy is the same way you will talk in front of a Church auditorium or to 6 year old kids.

My takeaway from the Super Bowl should have been the simple fact my team lost. Not that some in my industry and clients I have either worked for or would have wanted to work for, went for the lowest common denominator.

Gap. One new logo. 2 Days. Millions outraged.

You might not have heard, but Gap let loose a new logo. No, it is not at a mall near you yet, or possibly ever, but it set the usually mum designing community so abuzz, you’d think Adobe took away their paint brush tool. (If you haven’t seen it, you can see the new logo at Gap.com)

From a marketing standpoint, this almost has the feel of New Coke. Did Coca-Cola really make such a huge misstep or was it intentional? Never really got to the bottom of that one. Or did we?

Pepsi pulled a New Coke, logo wise, with Tropicana. That was a bona fide misstep that cost millions as they couldn’t pull their product, with the new logo, off the shelves fast enough.

So, did Gap pull a New Coke or a Tropicana?

Certain in the days ahead the truth will come about, but what is all the outrage about? Is it just designers seeing an opportunity to say something or do they all love the brand so much they want to stop this plight on malls everywhere? It isn’t like the current Gap logo is earth shattering or is it? Or are Gap wearing consumers trying to protect their closet from becoming outdated overnight?

Gap needed something to get their flat sales up as they have cannibalized themselves with their marketing efforts for Old Navy.

Regardless, Gap seems to be managing this PR disaster pretty well, not via denial, but by engaging their prospective consumer to assist in a new logo.

Welcome to User Initiated Crowdsourcing.

Every ad has a goal.

It is to sell something. I don’t care what it is. Product. Perception. Something.

The new Tiger Woods ad that debuted yesterday, with Tiger’s deceased father, Earl, doing the voice over, is creating a huge buzz, both good and negative.

I was asked yesterday what I thought about the spot and I looked at it through the eyes of a problem solving creative who had worked on the account.

Way back when another NIKE spot, featuring Sir Charles (Barkley) caused an uproar. The spot was called “I am not a role model” which at the time created quite a debate for its honesty, or for its lack of responsibility, as some debated. While everything in that spot was/ is true, many had an issue with it that sports heroes were/ are role models.

A decade plus later we are seeing a new formula, corporate confession as a sell. It appears to be working for Domino’s where they essentially admit and apologize for their past product and promise the current product you are getting is far superior.

Guess to solve a problem you have to admit you have one.

This Tiger spot creates more questions than answers for me. What is NIKE trying to sell here? Are you going to buy NIKE anything because of this spot? Or is it just setting up a question that will be answered later on? And will that answer be enough to return Tiger to a selling machine?

Or is this  “I am not a role model” part two, featuring Tiger?

This is probably the one trillionth and one post on the topic of crowdsourcing.

Where did this term originate? Well, by my 2 seconds of research it has been accredited to Jeff Howe in a Wired article, some 4 years ago.

What does it mean? According to the usually fallible Wikipedia, it “is a neologistic compound of Crowd and Outsourcing for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.” In effect, what we call in advertising a gang bang.

Is this a good thing? Time will tell if anything good comes from it, but feel free to point me to something that has been done in this manner that has been earth shattering, responsible and can compete with great work that has been done when the responsibility was left to only a few people. To date, I can’t.

So, I got to thinking, have I ever crowdsourced anything? 

In the past year, I can count two attempts. Super Bowl Glory (crowdsourcing a Super Bowl spot with 8 advertisers that after being green lighted by NBC, got the red light when a few of their advertisers got pissed off) and BuyABeerCompany.com (it started out as a joke, it really did).

Anything else? Maybe.

The year is 2000. Pre-iTunes/ iPod. Common internet speed? 56kbps.

One of our clients was a guy named David Lee Roth, at the time, former lead singer of Van Halen. The days of his voice framing a summer for the masses were about a decade or so in the past. His last album released, through lots of online promotion we did, sold about 200K albums. That would be 1998. The guitarist (John 5) on that album, who left to play for Marilyn Manson, wrote a song and took existing Diamond Dave audio from years past and created what we now call a mashup.

It was presented to me with a “What do you think?” And... “Can we do anything with it?”

This “song” was called “Look At All The People Here Tonite!”  Without a record label, the best case scenario was just putting this up on Roth’s website and be done with it. A “gift” to his fans. That would have gotten a couple of looks, but how to get some traction and maybe a look see by a new record label?

To get played on radio, you pay people to push your song onto the playlists, commonly known as Indies. Costs tons of money. And with deregulation of radio station ownership, you no longer fought in cities, but now had to go to the likes of Clear Channel and deal with their guy and he was programming for dozens of stations across the land. Plus, you would have to go out-of-pocket for promotions (Win a Ride on former Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth’s Jack Ass!!), etc.

DOA? Usually the artist would involve, to a small degree, the fan base. “Call your radio station and have them play our song,” etc. That requires sending out tons of professionally created CD’s with cool artwork to over 300 stations. But what if you don’t send it and still have the fans call? Hmm.

We created what looked like an album cover, got that out to the fan base of what was coming. Let that circulate and then, a few weeks later, had them contact their local stations to get the song played.

The fans never heard the song. And the radio stations didn’t have the song.

The fans, yes the fans, directed the radio stations to contact the website to receive a special login and download, burn it themselves and play it. Sounds crazy? 

With the fan’s desire to hear it, regardless of being good or bad, we turned them into Indies. 

This became the first ever single released to radio via the internet and through the power of crowsdourcing, it charted for a few weeks, as high as #35 on rock radio. The end benefit? Roth's catalog saw a spike in sales and talks opened up with promoters for a nationwide tour, etc. 

To me, engaging the crowd, can be a very powerful tool when the crowd benefits, in some degree, as a whole. 

Most of what I see, concerns me where the benefit is for a few, diminishing many individuals in the “crowd” to little more than human stepping stones, receiving a paltry “reward” (if any) for their talents.

Certain you’ve heard the phrase “break all the rules.” 

Maybe it was in a rah-rah format. As a tag line or said by a teacher in some portfolio finishing school. Could’ve even been your creative director who uttered these words, but regardless, when you start out in the advertising business, the first thing you must do is break all the rules and do what has never been done before. 

Question everything. Always.

Through the process of breaking the rules, the established rules become quickly evident. Sometimes they fall to the wayside. Sometimes they push back hard and fast. 

Doesn’t matter where your desk is located, out in the open, in the corner office, you must want to do this. Your agency, and ultimately a willing client, need to back up this notion. Break all the rules. Be stupid. Discover something new. Not just for the sake of it, but because we are in the business of creating, not just vehicles to sell, but to connect a truth from product to person. 

More often than not, the work that comes from these broken rules will never see the light of day in their original form, harpooned by a creative director or an account person or the client. 

The true trailblazers have hundreds of lumps on their heads from hitting that ceiling, they simply will not stop, they maintain the same daily, sleeves rolled up, enthusiasm. If they can’t get it done in their current circumstances, they will find another place that might be a better vessel for it or even go off and put their money where their mouth is and get it done on their own.

Many others will give up after a lump or two. Unfortunately they do dominate many work spaces in agencies all across the globe. They might even spend some time asking you “why bother?”

In our current economic climate, it might be safer to not be the one to stick your neck out. Not to push it to the limits. Not ask “why?” so you can still pull the paycheck.  If you are at this point, you may have already broken the one rule you should never break. The one that could set you adrift. The inner compass. 

Your own rules.

Since Oprah signed onto Twitter some 8 months ago, there has been an explosion of users. Not sure what the Twitter population stands at, but apparently it is enough for them to get about $100 Million in funding.  How are they going to pay that back? Hmm, haven’t we been here before?

About 9 years ago, I sat on a panel with fellow Brooklynite Jerry Della Femina, the head of Agency.com and about 4 others. It was for the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (you know them for The Emmy Awards), very first ever Internet / TV conference. Tickets were $650 each. Marriott Marquis. Times Square.

I had never done one of these before, but that didn’t stop them from putting me in the center of the dais. Every question ended in my lap, more or less.

Before this event, I started to lower my agency’s dotcom client base from 80% to 50%. Was hoping to get it down to 30%. While it was impossible to say no to a $10 million budget to advertise custom jewelry online, it just didn’t add up. 

Person after person would come to our office on West 19th street with a fistful of millions left over after they rented a penthouse and bought a Viper with their VC money.

Around this time, I was trying to get through a book, first book I refused to finish and to date, the last.  Just as you would expect, it was by experts, and anyone with 2 brain cells knew this was hocus-pocus. The book was called, wait, no, I call it The Clueless Manifesto. 

A reporter from the Washington Post asked me a question, apparently the answer I gave ruffled her feathers and as the 120 minute panel ended, she raced to me and asked if she could call me in 8 months to prove me wrong. I said absolutely, here is my card and here is my mobile. Want my home number just in case? 

What irked her was that I said this dotcom run would end in 8-9 months.  Of course saying this at an internet conference did not make me the most popular guy in the room.

I was wrong. 

It blew up in only 6 months.

The reporter from the Washington Post never did call.

Much like the old late night “get real estate with no-money-down infomercials,” I’m suddenly surrounded by internet experts on twitter. The porn links, OK I get it, but where the heck are all these experts coming from?  Is there some new school out there that gives a degree that makes you an expert?  Can they really tell their ASS from SEO?

And just in the nick of time, the clowns are back.

I came in as a copywriter. But with a healthy background in art, ok, maybe drawing Snoopy dressed as Gene Simmons spitting blood might not qualify as a true background in the arts, but I was 7, it looked good and scared the heck out of my parents (did I mention it was on pink paper?).

It got a reaction.

A few years later, the idea of my art traveling across the boroughs of New York City appealed to me, so I did my first “out of home” at the tender age of 12. Not this bullshit tagging. 3 or 4 color process. This too got a reaction, but they wore a badge and thankfully couldn’t run as fast.

Not simply satisfied with the visual arts, the aural arts were awaiting. A Gibson Reverse Firebird through a Marshall stack will bring all kinds of reactions, especially when you have your drummer move his kit into your basement.

Reactions.

About 18 months into my career, I was dealing direct with a client. It was a local micro-beer. Presented an ad to him in Braille for the launch of a new line of dark beers. Logo at bottom center. “Dark. Really Dark.” below that. Client looked at me like I had 4 heads. He was afraid that a protest against his company by a group for the blind would ensue. That wasn’t the intention. It was a cool ad. In what appeared as a lost proposition, had I taken a few different thoughtful paths, my mouth opened and without any hesitation I said, “then we’ll call the local news stations to cover the protest.”

The ad ran.

After about 9 months of efforts, that included why this beer will make you quit your job, to the deceptive collectable coasters, his little micro-beer line was distributed in over 11 states from NY to CA. 

I was no longer in advertising.  I was now in the reaction business.

And these reactions were getting results.

It didn’t matter where, yes, put the opposing teams logo on urinal cakes at the stadium!  Lets pre-launch that casino/hotel with a YouTube series that is filmed from a peep hole, so we can “watch” the celebrities sneak by! Or maybe spoof an infomercial to get people to go to confession.

Absolutely strive for positive reactions. But I’d rather them be negative than ignored.

That is why I am no longer in advertising.